South Korea’s Watergate Moment: How a Media Coalition Brought Down the Park Geun-hye Government

ABSTRACT

South Korea had a Watergate moment in 2016, when a corruption scandal led to an impeachment of the president. Two media outlets in particular, the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh and JTBC, a TV station with roots in Samsung, first broke and then sensationalized the scandal that motivated the candlelight protests. Using textual analysis and oral history interviews, this article critically examines news institutions and journalistic culture to derive three main findings. First, the democracy movement of the 1980s provided institutional and cultural foundations. Second, commercial desires facilitated higher-quality journalism, rather than undermining it. The economic liberalization and the precarity of the economy as a whole influenced both the media industry at large and the specific business strategies that motivated JTBC. Third, there is an Americanization of journalistic norms and culture. While the two outlets were outnumbered by better-funded pro-government outlets, the duo ultimately prevailed with an irreverent culture of truth-seeking.

KEYWORDS:

• Commercial media
• democratization
• investigative journalism
• journalism history
• media system
• news culture
• scandal
• South Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For prominent Korean leaders already familiar to a global public (ex. President Park Geun-hye and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon), this article adheres to AP style for Romanization of Korean names, listing the family name before the given name. For those lesser known outside Korea, the order has been reversed to first name followed by family name per international practice, as in Suk-hee Sohn and Soon-sil Choi.

2 Because JTBC/JoongAng Ilbo and TV Chosun/Chosun Ilbo are excluded in KINDS, I conducted separate searches for the four conservative outlets on Naver.com. The two searches on KINDS and NAVER yielded over 4,000 articles.